Announcing Beta 4 for CI Factory 0.8.0.101. It can be downloaded here and the release notes can be viewed from here.

Justin Santa Barbara has made big contribution to this release. He submitted not only a patch, but 2 complete Packages: Wix and Xenocode. Justin was able to jump in and create brand new Packages with installers with out any help from me. He was also able to work his way through a patch that was not just at the NAnt level but the C# level too. His contributions add weight to my desire to focus more on making CI Factory easy to use, understand, and contribute too than on documenting it. This is not to say that I wont be concentrating some more than usual on documentation. I have finally got the NAnt documentation generation added to the build. Personally I would rather not have to read documentation, I would rather it was just plain as day. Thanks Justin - You Rock!

Just in case you have not noticed, there will be a release every Sunday until the RTM. There might be a Hot Beta in the middle of the week, a surprise, the kind that just can’t wait.

So I am happy to share that there is a lot happening for CI Factory.  Recently I was on Hanselminutes talking to Scott about CI Factory.  This week I hope to be doing a dnrTV show.  On April 14th at the NoVa Code Camp in Reston Va Paolo del Mundo will be “giving a presentation about CI Factory (and Continuous Integration in general)”.  I will be there too.  On April 28th at the Richmond Code Camp in Glen Allen Va I will be presenting on CI Factory.  It will include a live demo where we can get our hands dirty!  If I can, there will be wireless and you can participate.

I have been getting a lot of email about adding new packages.  I created a new Google Group to help share the knowledge transfer with more people.  Please join the new CI Factory Dev Google Group and or the old CI Factory User Google Group for help on all things CI Factory, NAnt, CCNet, and CI in general.  On the note of trying to help people more with CI Factory I have been working on getting a Google Apps for Domains service for cifactory.org.  So far they can’t seem to verify domain ownership in order to turn on the service.  I expect that JotSpot will be rolled in and we will have some very nice resources.

This week, with help, work began on these new Packages: Vault, CVS, and FinalBuilder.  I think the FinalBuilder Package is in a useable state in Beta 3.  Help on these Packages would be very welcome.

I noticed the download count on the Google Project Host has gotten higher than I expected.  The last RTM release on 12/29/06 has been downloaded 26400+ times and the total downloads for the 0.8 Beta series, 03/04/07, is 550+.  As well the user group has picked up 10 new members in the last 10 days.

Lastly just in case you did not know CI Factory is in Windows Developer Power Tools.

Announcing Beta 3 for CI Factory 0.8.0.89.  It can be downloaded here and the release notes can be view from here.

This release has a bunch of fixes in it for the VSS folks.  There was an awful lot of regression in the are a VSS so I was quite motivated to automate some end to end testing.  I now have a basic NAnt unit testing framework and 2 end to end tests.  One for VSS and one for SVN.  They both do an install and test to make sure that the very first time the CCNet server starts the build for the product is successful.  Not the most robust on the assertion part but that is something that I can easily remedy.

To accommodate this automation several new tasks and functions were created that interact with a CCNet server.  Some of you may find them useful in managing many CCNet servers.

The CCNet Server Aggregator is now in the Power Tools.